Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning writer-director, speaks out on why he left the cult of Scientology.

excerpt:

By now, Haggis had begun advancing through the upper levels of Scientology… According to several copies of church documents that have been leaked online, Hubbard’s handwritten instructions for the first level list thirteen mental exercises that attune practitioners to their relationship with others, such as “Note several large and several small male bodies until you have a cognition. Note it down.” In the second level, Scientologists engage in exercises and visualizations that explore oppositional forces:

> Laughter comes from the rear half and calm from the front
> half simultaneously. Then they reverse. It gives one a
> sensation of total disagreement. The trick is to conceive
> of both at the same time. This tends to knock one out.

Haggis didn’t have a strong reaction to the material, but then he wasn’t expecting anything too profound. Everyone knew that the big revelations resided in level O.T. III.

Hubbard called this level the Wall of Fire. He said, “The material involved in this sector is so vicious, that it is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it… I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material.”...

“The process of induction is so long and slow that you really do convince yourself of the truth of some of these things that don’t make sense,” Haggis told me. Although he refused to specify the contents of O.T. materials, on the ground that it offended Scientologists, he said, “If they’d sprung this stuff on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right away.”

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